Current Story/Newest Happenings
Day One The travelers have run into each other on the road to Balthan. At the beginning of our adventure they have spent several days travelling in tandem towards the tomb of an old queen just unearthed outside the town. After hanging around in the tavern for a bit collecting information from the locals and the adventurers flocking to the reward promised by the tomb. Excited to head out, the party spoke with the bartender, passed off a couple collection quests and hired a guide to take them out to the tomb. Upon arrival and initial descent, the party noticed something odd. they noticed that the walls were not actually stone but rather dirt rather poorly painted grey. They proceded through an iron gate, over a pit of spikes and into a room where came face to face with two goblins. After a few initial misses while they got their stride, they quickly dispatched the goblins. They continued up some sloping steps they come to a room with two men congratulating them on their successful completion of the dungeon and offering them contracts for the King's Army. Russell signs up unquestioningly but the others politely decline and head back towards the town. They check back in with the town bulletin board and head to a house at the edge of town to take on a quest asking for help with dire rats. But the farmer is asleep so they head to the bartender to hear about some bugbears causing a minor nuisance just outside of town. They quickly take down sis bugbears: three awake and three asleep. As it's very late when they finish ridding the town of bugbears, they head back to the tavern to rent some rooms and recover. Day Two Rested, the party finds that the bartender at their inn has grown more aware of their skills and clues them into some bigger deeds to be done; there's zombies under the church (their moaning during sermons becoming especially troublesome) and a whole grip of bugbears, of the same tribe as those that had been dispatched as they dreamt, is in the woods a few days out. However, the gang decides to warm up helping the fella on the end of town with a rat problem. His basement is infested with the critters, and the fight leaves some of the crew on the verge of death, neccessitating another day of rest after. Day Three As they've been warned that the bugbear problem is a task that adventurers actually haven't been returning from, the ever-cautious adventuring party begins their day cleansing the church's catacombs of undead. As ecclesiastical exterminations go, this has been a swell one. The catacombs started simply, with only a pair of zombies in the first room, one falling fast to Gwilor's guisarme as Faradis fileted another. They continue down into the basement and encounter a few other zombies, a ghoul, a gaunt, and a magical ring that Gwilor snatches up. The ghoul briefly paralyzes Raija, but Jhil drags her out of harms way and the party has little trouble decimating their foes. The party, emboldened by their easy dispatches of said ghoulies, proceed down through a hole in the floor. Faradis shrugs the room off, as there's naught but a wight inside, but the party quickly learns that wights are a force to be reckoned with. Faradis manages to slice through this one and the party continues on their way. Day Four The adventurers continue through the catacombs. Day Five Fucking mummies. Fucking wrapped in anal-swabs, Mall of America for maggots, haven't been laid in 4000 years, piece of shit mummies. Fucking everybody dies. They take down some skeletal golem things first and then the mummies get there. Faradis fucking dies to the skeletal golem and has to go get his ass revived. Then the party starts. The mummy party. Killing those fuckers takes a whole fucking day and by the end of it Dorak is dead and Faradis feels like shit. So do Raija and Gwilor. And Dorak is fucking dead. And Faradis is some fucking reanimated corpse. And as the adventurers start the four-day trek home, they start to realise. The mummies have fucking cursed them. They've fucking infected their constitution and their charisma, rendering them weak, feeble and ugly. Raija and Gwilor die on the way home. Faradis makes it alive but has to be carried by Dr. Drab's eidolon. And Dorak is being dragged by the armor back home. A venerable and powerful Cleric of Pelor brings everybody back to life the way he brought Faradis back and now they owe the church shitloads of gold. Well, not that much really. But a lot. Day Six Somewhat cowed after, well, everybody died, and without a shilling to their names, the party decides to take some low-level clean-up quests they'd been offered before but passed over. They take down a camp of bugbears for a small reward, and trek into the marshes, assaulting crocodiles and vipers along the way, to find and slaughter a black dragon wyrmling. Surprisingly out of debt by the time these small adventures are over, the party meets back at the inn to decide where to go next: there's a city overridden with undead that the Cleric needs brave men to enter for the recon of a few holy scripts. There's a juvenile white dragon waiting for them back in the mountains where they encountered the mummies. With the undead city comes the promise of returning a favor and repaying a debt. But with the white dragon lies a horde of treasure. Day Seven See Bob play catch with his eidolon by the campfire. Hear Bob spew bullshit about how he's trying to "socialize" an outsider while everyone else is trying to sleep because it's most "receptive as a vessel" when the moon is at its zenith. See the wandering stars Vallis and Cor in perfect alignment. See Lon-Lon trip over a snoring Dorak and at that exact same moment catch the bag full of reagents Bob tries to use for his planar magic (reagents that the careless caster has neglected to wrap individually). Notice how, by pure happenstance, a stray spark from the fire swerves into the bag that has been just momentarily jostled open. Behold the eddie of screaming etherium which bursts into the air above the campsite, electricity arcing erratically inside the black and green thunderous turbine of terror. Wave farewell to Bob and his hulking buddy as the vortex engulfs them and promptly disappears with a faint pop. See Dorak scratch his bum and roll over. The next morning the party awoke to find a trusted friend missing, and completely ignored this and went on to meet with the cleric to whome a few owed their lives. The cleric gave clarifications on the quest in the dead city, and the party went out to quell the evil that lurked in the long empty town. Upon reaching their destination the party found the town was indeed overrun by the undead, and started to dispach the beasts with a great deal of ease. Slowed only momentarily by hulking zombified horses the group went on to go house by house to kill the zombies..... and loot the houses. After all the beasts had been slain the party went on and continued their quest for the old cleric's books and met some ghoulish resistance in the church. After a short encounter and a slightly odd moment of retroactive death on the part of two ghouls, the party went upstairs to get the old cleric's books. As they entered the old cleric's chambers, the party saw two more undead gnawing on the remains of the poor old man. After a once again fairly easy encounter the party found the books they had been questing for, but their curiousity (greed) led them downstairs into the basement. The party found two remaining undead in their path, and a locked stone door behind them. The door proved itself a much more worthy challenge then the ghouls, but after some skilled lockpicking the party entered a seemingly empty room with gold and jewels for the party to liberate (steal). Some of the more perceptive party members noticed two shadowy figures and our heroes had to quickly decide to fight or leave the monsters and treasure alone. In the end bravery (also greed) won and the party chose to fight the etherial creatures. Due to their immunity to physical damage the two non-magical party members got out of the way (ran away) of the other party members. After their hardest battle of the day the party gathered the loot and went back to the cleric. Due to the parties clearly anti-social tendencies they, now weeks after being brought back to life by the man, learned cleric Neil's name. After some friendly banter with Neil the party went to the inn to rest before heading off to fight a dragon, before long the party recognized and greeted the army men from before. The men explained they did not actually work for the army and that they were just retired adventurers that had been hired out by the army. They went on to detail their final adventure where one of their friends vanished with a tresure map after going into a cave where, presumably, he died. The party told the men that after their trip to the mountains they might help them out with their missing map problem. Four long days later the party made it up the mountain and found the dragon. While a powerful foe, the dragon was eventually taken down by the party who then gathered up its small horde, then set off to once again attempt to brave the mummy's tomb. Day Eight "We're Back!" Dr. Drab shouts, waking the party. He sports an oversized sombrero and has made eggs enough to go around. (A few of the more daring and famished party members reluctantly partake, although the eggs certainly don't appear very appetizing, what with their patches of fur and unidentifiable crunch. A week later, the adventurers would learn that these were the unhatched larva of inter-dimensional Brain-boring slugs. "Perfectly harmless once cooked!" Drab will assure everyone in a chipper tone.) Lon-lon glows with a newly-acquired aquamarine tan. Despite Bob's desperate commands, the outsider stubbornly refuses to take off its Lucha-libre style mask.